Um…yes. Most people won't sell their souls…but they can be rented.
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Hey Navy, We’re Doing This Aviation Thing All Wrong
- Thread starter das
- Start date
I am no Prowler guy (just a HARM truck at best really) but your "blue on blue" comment makes no sense. SEAD is typically a low fratricide risk mission, as far as missions go. In fact, the only mission I can think of with less fratricide risk is Armed Recce or MIR (or ISR or whatever acronym you want to use to say recon).
The current reality is ironically much different.
We have manned combat aircraft flying HVAAP missions for UAVs. Twilight zone.
Sad...
Protect your benevolent robot masters...
On the other hand, Iran did shoot a drone down and they aren't cheap.
UAVs certainly aren't cheap enough to be considered expendable.
I'd imagine they get manned fighter support due to the value of the product they provide.
RadicalDude
Social Justice Warlord
"National assets."
The frequency spectrum is a very crowded place where one emitter can look an awful lot like another if you don't know what you are looking at, I saw plenty of those mistakes as an EP-3 guy. The jamming part of SEAD is pretty low risk to friendly forces but a HARM being fired at a friendly radar has happened before and there would be a lot more risk in a more crowded and contested battlefield. The last thing I want is a UAV roaming around trying to kill radars being spooked and spoofed by anything that looks like a SAM radar.
They shot down a Boeing Insitu ScanEagle; not sure of total costs for one (this article only has costs for a complete system), but I'll bet it's < $1mil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Insitu_ScanEagle
OMG. I think the whole "point" of UAS is (was?) to do the "dull (12+ hours…), dangerous (whatever you may read into that…) and dirty (CBRN environments…)" missions. Putting up carbon-based life-forms to "escort" them totally negates the whole purpose…IMHO.
In this context it actually seems to make sense.
Need "something" to deter them from just taking them out during "peacetime," or it just gets expensive for us.
Some of it is political, both internal and external, and some of it has to do with airspace rules put up by countries we are flying them out of/over/near. Since they are still relatively 'new' outside the war zones where we either own the airspace or don't care what the country we are flying over thinks there are still plenty of things to work out in the more 'normal' world WRT to airspace coordination and control, etc.
That and they are a VERY big political hot potato in most of the rest of the real world, the mere mention of 'drones' being based somewhere will make a lot of the locals flip their shit and think we are going to smote them with a Hellfire on their way to the club in their Kia after they posted some vaguely anti-American screed that was picked up by the omniscient NSA. You would think I was kidding.......Having a manned aircraft keeping an eye on a UAV while it prowls around for evildoers assuages some governments that are just starting to allow UAVs in country.
How about this: make a list of missions that generally have a higher risk of frat than SEAD. --that list is long.
Now, make a list of missions that generally have a lower risk of frat than SEAD. -- that list is short.
Get it? The impending arrival of the AARGM even furthers this point.
Of all the missions I do that I believe might be easiest for a drone to take over, SEAD is right up there at the top. Especially if it is pre-planned SEAD for a strike. Reactive SEAD is a little different.
